Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday March 16, 2018 @04:30AM
from the behind-the-scenes dept.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Schneier on Security: One of the effects of GDPR -- the new EU General Data Protection Regulation -- is that we're all going to be learning a lot more about who collects our data and what they do with it. Consider PayPal, that just released a list of over 600 companies they share customer data with. Here's a good visualization of that data. Is 600 companies unusual? Is it more than average? Less? We'll soon know.

Posted
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BeauHDon Thursday March 15, 2018 @08:10PM
from the fresh-coat-of-paint dept.

Less than two months before Google I/O, Google has rebranded its Android Wear watch platform to "Wear OS." The recent name change is part of a move to have its watches stand apart from Android, but it could also indicate that Google's smartwatch strategy is about to shift. Google may release a completely new Wear OS focused on the Google Assistant or a Google-branded smartwatch. Scott Stein writes via CNET that Android Wear needs more than a new name to fight the Apple Watch: The Apple Watch took over the top spot in global wearable sales recently, according to IDC, despite the fact that it's only compatible with iPhones. Fitbit just announced the Versa, a promising casual smartwatch that will interface with any iPhone or Android and starts at just $200. The wearable market is growing. But where is Google in that picture? The Fossil Group, maker of many of the Android Wear watch products last year, reported some promising numbers: "In 2017, Fossil Group nearly doubled its wearables business to more than $300 million, including 20 percent of watch sales in Q4," said Greg McKelvey, Fossil's chief strategy and digital officer, as part of Google's Wear OS announcement. So it sounds like Android Wear -- sorry, Wear OS -- is still in the game. But the problem, for me, is that I've never found Android Wear watches to be particularly great. Google relaunched Android Wear over a year ago with new software and added fitness smarts, plus standalone phone functions. But Apple's watch strategy has advanced faster, with better hardware. The Apple Watch S3 can be a phone, now. So can Samsung's Gear S3, which runs on Tizen. Google, meanwhile, stopped adding cellular functions to watches after the lackluster LG Watch Sport last year.

Posted
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BeauHDon Thursday March 15, 2018 @04:48PM
from the caught-red-handed dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In its race to catch Amazon.com in online retailing, Walmart issued misleading e-commerce results and fired an executive who complained the company was breaking the law, according to a whistle-blower lawsuit. Tri Huynh, a former director of business development at Walmart, claims he was terminated "under false pretenses" after repeatedly raising concerns about the company's "overly aggressive push to show meteoric growth in its e-commerce business by any means possible -- even, illegitimate ones." Under Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon, Walmart has invested billions to catch up with Amazon in e-commerce over the past few years, and last year enjoyed quarterly online sales growth rates surpassing 50 percent, well above peers that include Target and Best Buy Huynh claims Walmart mislabeled products so that some third-party vendors received lower commissions, failed to process customer returns, and allowed offensive items onto the site. Huynh's dismissal in January 2017 -- just a day after a retail-industry publication singled him out as one of the sector's rising stars -- was in retaliation for warning senior executives about the misdeeds, he said in the lawsuit, filed Thursday by employment litigation attorney David M. deRubertis in San Francisco federal court.

Posted
by
msmash
on Thursday March 15, 2018 @02:30PM
from the eyes-wide-open dept.

Lightning Labs on Thursday announced the beta release of its highly-anticipated Lightning Network Daemon (LND), a developer-friendly software client used to access Bitcoin's Lightning Network, anonymous readers wrote, citing media reports. From a report: Bitcoin supporters believe that the network has the potential to help the cryptocurrency achieve mass adoption. Bitcoin has struggled in recent months with slow and high-fee transactions, which make it harder for bitcoin to achieve mainstream popularity. Lightning Labs, the company behind the network, also announced on Thursday that it has received investments from major financial technology players, including Square chief executive and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and PayPal chief operating officer David Sacks.

Posted
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BeauHDon Thursday March 15, 2018 @12:41PM
from the sign-of-the-times dept.

The largest U.S. radio station owner, iHeartMedia, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as it "struggles with $20 billion in debt and falling revenue at its 858 radio stations," reports Reuters. The company has reportedly reached an agreement with holders of more than $10 billion of its outstanding debt for a balance sheet restructuring, which will reduce its debt by more than $10 billion. From the report: Cash on hand and cash generated from ongoing operations will be sufficient to fund the business during the bankruptcy process, said iHeartMedia, which owns Z100 in New York and Real 103.5 KISS FM in Chicago. The filing comes after John Malone's Liberty Media Corp proposed on Feb. 26 a deal to buy a 40 percent stake in a restructured iHeartMedia for $1.16 billion, uniting the company with Liberty's Sirius XM Holdings Inc satellite radio service. Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc, a subsidiary of iHeartMedia, and its units did not commence Chapter 11 proceedings. The company had 14,300 employees at the end of 2016, according to its most recent annual report.

Posted
by
msmash
on Thursday March 15, 2018 @12:05PM
from the tough-business-model dept.

Digg announced this week that it's shutting down Digg Reader, an app which allows users to follow RSS feeds from sites. From a report: Following the closure of Google Reader, RSS fans flocked to the likes of Feedly, The Old Reader, Digg Reader and Inoreader. Now Digg Reader has announced that it is to close, and users are being advised to export their feeds so they can be imported into an alternative service. Users do not have a great deal of time to grab their data and take it elsewhere. The RSS reader is due to close on March 26, meaning there's less than two weeks to go. No reason has been given for the closure, but presumably the venture either didn't prove as popular as expected, or it was rather more costly to run than anticipated.

Posted
by
msmash
on Thursday March 15, 2018 @11:29AM
from the setting-wrong-precedence dept.

Earlier this week, a little-known security firm called CTS Labs reported, what it claimed to be, severe vulnerabilities and backdoors in some AMD processors. While AMD looks into the matter, the story behind the researchers' discovery and the way they made it public has become a talking point in security circles. The researchers, who work for CTS Labs, only reported the flaws to AMD shortly before publishing their report online. Typically, researchers give companies a few weeks or even months to fix the issues before going public with their findings. To make things even stranger, a little bit over 30 minutes after CTS Labs published its report, a controversial financial firm called Viceroy Research published what they called an "obituary" for AMD. Motherboard reports: "We believe AMD is worth $0.00 and will have no choice but to file for Chapter 11 (Bankruptcy) in order to effectively deal with the repercussions of recent discoveries," Viceroy wrote in its report. CTS Labs seemed to hint that it too had a financial interest in the performance of AMD stock. "We may have, either directly or indirectly, an economic interest in the performance of the securities of the companies whose products are the subject of our reports," CTS Labs wrote in the legal disclaimer section of its report.

On Twitter, rumors started to swirl. Are the researchers trying to make money by betting that AMD's share price will go down due to the news of the vulnerabilities? Or, in Wall Street jargon, were CTS Labs and Viceroy trying to short sell AMD stock? Security researcher Arrigo Triulzi speculated that Viceroy and CTS Lab were profit sharing for shorting, while Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos warned against a future where security research is driven by short selling.

[...] There's no evidence that CTS Labs worked with Viceroy to short AMD. But something like that has happened before. In 2016, security research firm MedSec found vulnerabilities in pacemakers made by St. Jude Medical. In what was likely a first, MedSec partnered with hedge fund Muddy Waters to bet against St. Jude Medical's stock. For Adrian Sanabria, director of research at security firm Threatcare and a former analyst at 451 Research, where he covered the cybersecurity industry, trying to short based on vulnerabilities just doesn't make much sense. While it could work in theory and could become more common in the future, he said in a phone call, "I don't think we've seen enough evidence of security vulnerabilities really moving the stock for it to really become an issue." Further reading: Linus Torvalds slams CTS Labs over AMD vulnerability report (ZDNet).

Posted
by
BeauHDon Thursday March 15, 2018 @03:00AM
from the bottomless-pit dept.

Zorro shares a report from Bloomberg that details Amazon's rapid growth in the last three years: Amazon makes no sense. It's the most befuddling, illogically sprawling, and -- to a growing sea of competitors -- flat-out terrifying company in the world. It sells soap and produces televised soap operas. It sells complex computing horsepower to the U.S. government and will dispatch a courier to deliver cold medicine on Christmas Eve. It's the third-most-valuable company on Earth, with smaller annual profits than Southwest Airlines Co., which as of this writing ranks 426th. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos is the world's richest person, his fortune built on labor conditions that critics say resemble a Dickens novel with robots, yet he has enough mainstream appeal to play himself in a Super Bowl commercial. Amazon was born in cyberspace, but it occupies warehouses, grocery stores, and other physical real estate equivalent to 90 Empire State Buildings, with a little left over. The company has grown so large and difficult to comprehend that it's worth taking stock of why and how it's left corporate America so thoroughly freaked out. Executives at the biggest U.S. companies mentioned Amazon thousands of times during investor calls last year, according to transcripts -- more than President Trump and almost as often as taxes. Other companies become verbs because of their products: to Google or to Xerox. Amazon became a verb because of the damage it can inflict on other companies. To be Amazoned means to have your business crushed because the company got into your industry. And fear of being Amazoned has become such a defining feature of commerce, it's easy to forget the phenomenon has arisen mostly in about three years.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday March 14, 2018 @09:30PM
from the here-we-go-again dept.

Chicago-based MBM Company's jewelry brand Limoges Jewelry has accidentally leaked the personal information for over 1.3 million people. This includes addresses, zip-codes, e-mail addresses, and IP addresses. The Germany security firm Kromtech Security, which found the leak via an unsecured Amazon S3 storage bucket, also claims the database contained plaintext passwords. The Next Web reports: In a press release, Kromtech Security's head of communicationis, Bob Diachenko, said: "Passwords were stored in the plain text, which is great negligence [sic], taking into account the problem with many users re-using passwords for multiple accounts, including email accounts." The [MSSQL database] backup file was named "MBMWEB_backup_2018_01_13_003008_2864410.bak," which suggests the file was created on January 13, 2018. It's believed to contain current information about the company's customers. Records held in the database have dates reaching as far back as 2000. The latest records are from the start of this year. Other records held in the database include internal mailing lists, promo-codes, and item orders, which leads Kromtech to believe that this could be the primary customer database for the company. Diachenko says there's no evidence a malicious third-party has accessed the dump, but that "that does not mean that nobody [has] accessed the data."

Posted
by
msmash
on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @08:50PM
from the closer-look dept.

It seems reasonable that breathing in pollution would affect worker productivity, but only recently has the damage been documented. From a report: In a series of studies that match readings from air monitors with the results of workers who are paid for daily piece work, researchers demonstrated that breathing polluted air impedes the ability of workers to pick berries, pack fruit, or even make phone calls from office cubicles.

The studies, which were collected in the journal Science (pay wall) in January, were conducted over 10 years by team of researchers at Columbia, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, San Diego. The biggest impact of air pollution was measured in farm workers in California's Central Valley, who were paid by the volume of grapes and blueberries they collected. On days that had higher readings of ground-level ozone -- a harmful gas formed when tailpipe emissions mix with sunlight -- worker productivity slumped.

Over the two years they measured the ozone, readings ranged from 10 to 86 parts per billion, and averaged 48 ppb. For every 10 ppb increase in ozone, worker productivity fell 5.5%. For farm workers paid about $9 or $10 an hour, the lost productivity translates into about 45 cents an hour of lower pay, said Matthew Neidell, an economist at Columbia and an author of the studies.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday March 14, 2018 @08:10PM
from the production-hell dept.

Several current and former employees of Tesla said that the automaker is manufacturing a surprisingly high ratio of flawed parts and vehicles, leading to more rework and repairs than can be contained at its factory in Fremont, California. CNBC reports: One current Tesla engineer estimated that 40 percent of the parts made or received at its Fremont factory require rework. The need for reviews of parts coming off the line, and rework, has contributed to Model 3 delays, the engineer said. Another current employee from Tesla's Fremont factory said the company's defect rate is so high that it's hard to hit production targets. Inability to hit the numbers is in turn hurting employee morale. To deal with a backlog of flawed parts and vehicles, said these current and former employees, Tesla has brought in teams of technicians and engineers from its service centers and remanufacturing lines to help with rework and repairs on site in Fremont. They also said that sometimes the luxury EV maker has taken the unusual measure of sending flawed or damaged parts from Fremont to its remanufacturing facility in Lathrop, California, about 50 miles away, instead of fixing those parts "in-line." Tesla flatly denies that its remanufacturing teams engage in rework. "Our remanufacturing team does not 'rework' cars," a spokesperson said. The company said the employees might be conflating rework and remanufacturing. It also said every vehicle is subjected to rigorous quality control involving more than 500 inspections and tests. The report from CNBC has caused Tesla's stock to tumble today. You can read Tesla's full statement about the CNBC report here.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday March 14, 2018 @07:20PM
from the end-of-an-era dept.

Toy store chain Toys R Us is reportedly planning to sell or close all 800 of its U.S. stores(Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), affecting as many as 33,000 jobs as the company winds down its operations after six decades. The Washington Post reports: The news comes six months after the retailer filed for bankruptcy. The company has struggled to pay down nearly $8 billion in debt -- much of it dating back to a 2005 leveraged buyout -- and has had trouble finding a buyer. There were reports earlier this week that Toys R Us had stopped paying its suppliers, which include the country's largest toy makers. On Wednesday, the company announced it would close all 100 of its U.K. stores. In the United States, the company told employees closures would likely occur over time, and not all at once, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

Wednesday's announcement marks the first criminal charge brought in one of the largest data breaches in history. Ying, the former chief information officer for Equifax's U.S. information-solutions business, used confidential information entrusted to him by the company to determine it had been hacked, according to a separate complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

ZDNet adds: According to a Justice Department statement, Ying sent a text message to a colleague two weeks before Equifax revealed the hack, in which he said the breach "sounds bad." Three days later, Ying searched the web to research the effect of Experian's 2015 own breach on its stock price. Later that day, Ying excised all his available stock options.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday March 14, 2018 @01:20PM
from the long-time-coming dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The SEC has charged Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani with fraud relating to the startup's fundraising activities. The company, as well as CEO Holmes and former president Balwani are said to have raised more than $700 million from investors through "an elaborate, years-long fraud." This involved making "false statements about the company's technology, business and financial performance." In a statement, the commission said that the company, and its two executives, misled investors about the capability of its blood testing technology. Theranos' big selling point was that its hardware could scan for a number of diseases with just a small drop of blood. Unfortunately, the company was never able to demonstrate that its system worked as well as its creators claimed.

The company and Elizabeth Holmes have already agreed to settle the charges leveled against them by the SEC. Holmes will have to pay a $500,000 fine and return 18.9 million shares in Theranos that she owned, as well as downgrading her super-majority equity into common stock. The CEO is now barred from serving as the officer or director of a public company for 10 years. In addition, if Theranos is liquidated or acquired, Holmes cannot profit from her remaining shareholding unless $750 million is handed back to defrauded investors. Balwani, on the other hand, is facing a federal court case in the Northern District of California where the SEC will litigate its claims against him. Worth noting: the court still has to approve the deals between Holmes and Theranos, and neither party has admitted any wrongdoing.

Posted
by
msmash
on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @10:08AM
from the taking-a-stand dept.

Google is cracking down on cryptocurrency-related advertising. From a report: The company is updating its financial services-related ad policies to ban any advertising about cryptocurrency-related content, including initial coin offerings (ICOs), wallets, and trading advice, Google's director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer, told CNBC. That means that even companies with legitimate cryptocurrency offerings won't be allowed to serve ads through any of Google's ad products, which place advertising on its own sites as well as third-party websites. This update will go into effect in June 2018, according to a company post. "We don't have a crystal ball to know where the future is going to go with cryptocurrencies, but we've seen enough consumer harm or potential for consumer harm that it's an area that we want to approach with extreme caution," Scott said.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Tuesday March 13, 2018 @08:03PM
from the always-watching dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal(Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source):At Best Buy, returning too many items within a short time can hurt a person's score, as can returning high-theft items such as digital cameras. Every time shoppers returns purchases to Best Buy, they are tracked by a company which has the power to override the store's touted policy and refuse to refund their money. That is because the electronics giant is one of several chains that have hired a service called The Retail Equation to score customers' shopping behavior and impose limits on the amount of merchandise they can return. Stores have long used generous return guidelines to lure more customers, but such policies also invite abuse. Retailers estimate 11% of their sales are returned, and of those, 11% are likely fraudulent returns, according to a 2017 survey of 63 retailers by the National Retail Federation. Return fraud or abuse occurs when customers exploit the return process, such as requesting a refund for items they have used, stolen or bought somewhere else.

Amazon.com Inc. and other online players that have made it easy to return items have changed consumer expectations, adding pressure on brick-and-mortar chains. Some retailers monitor return fraud in-house, but Best Buy and others pay The Retail Equation to track and score each customer's return behavior for both in-store and online purchases. The service also works with Home Depot, J.C. Penney, Sephora and Victoria's Secret. Some retailers use the system only to assess returns made without a receipt. Best Buy uses The Retail Equation to assess all returns, even those made with a receipt.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Tuesday March 13, 2018 @06:40PM
from the hot-potato dept.

Amazon is recalling 260,000 AmazonBasics portable power banks that can "overheat and ignite," according to a release by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The company has received more than 50 reports of the power banks overheating in the U.S., causing chemical burns and property damage. CNBC reports: "Consumers should immediately unplug and stop using the recalled power banks and contact Amazon for instructions on how to return the unit and receive a full refund," the release says. Amazon is contacting everyone who purchased one of the affected devices. The recall covers six versions of the AmazonBasics portable battery: 16,100 mAh; 10,000 mAh; 5,600 mAh; 2,000 mAh with micro USB cable; 3,000 mAh; and 3,000 mAh with USB micro cable.

As part of the class certification process and civil discovery, Microsoft handed over years of records to the plaintiffs' lawyers. In the Monday-released filing, which was originally submitted to the court in October 2017, Moussouris' lawyer, Michael Subit, wrote that "Microsoft's Culture is Rife with Sexual Harassment" before continuing: "Company records indicate that women at Microsoft are sexualized by their male managers and coworkers, leading to a substantial number of incidents of alleged sexual harassment, and even several incidents of sexual assault, that often go unpunished." Specifically, Subit continued, Microsoft's internal unit (known as "ERIT") received 108 complaints of sexual harassment filed by female US-based technical employees, 119 complaints of gender discrimination, eight complaints of retaliation, and three complaints of pregnancy discrimination. Out of all of the claimed instances of gender discrimination, Microsoft's internal investigation only found that one such complaint was "founded."

Posted
by
msmash
on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @04:40PM
from the closer-look dept.

Stack Overflow has released the results of its annual survey of 100,000 developers, revealing the most-popular, top-earning, and preferred programming languages. ArsTechnica: JavaScript remains the most widely used programming language among professional developers, making that six years at the top for the lingua franca of Web development. Other Web tech including HTML (#2 in the ranking), CSS (#3), and PHP (#9). Business-oriented languages were also in wide use, with SQL at #4, Java at #5, and C# at #8. Shell scripting made a surprising showing at #6 (having not shown up at all in past years, which suggests that the questions have changed year-to-year), Python appeared at #7, and systems programming stalwart C++ rounded out the top 10.

These aren't, however, the languages that developers necessarily want to use. Only three languages from the most-used top ten were in the most-loved list; Python (#3), JavaScript (#7), and C# (#8). For the third year running, that list was topped by Rust, the new systems programming language developed by Mozilla. Second on the list was Kotlin, which wasn't even in the top 20 last year. This new interest is likely due to Google's decision last year to bless the language as an official development language for Android. TypeScript, Microsoft's better JavaScript than JavaScript comes in at fourth, with Google's Go language coming in at fifth. Smalltalk, last year's second-most loved, is nowhere to be seen this time around. These languages may be well-liked, but it looks as if the big money is elsewhere. Globally, F# and OCaml are the top average earners, and in the US, Erlang, Scala, and OCaml are the ones to aim for. Visual Basic 6, Cobol, and CoffeeScript were the top three most-dreaded, which is news that will surprise nobody who is still maintaining Visual Basic 6 applications thousands of years after they were originally written.

Posted
by
msmash
on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @02:00PM
from the not-the-onion dept.

The startup accelerator Y Combinator is known for supporting audacious companies in its popular three-month boot camp. There's never been anything quite like Nectome, though. From a report: Next week, at YC's "demo days," Nectome's cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process. Then the MIT graduate will make his business pitch. As it says on his website: "What if we told you we could back up your mind?" So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.

This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome's procedure to work, it's essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though anesthetized). The company has consulted with lawyers familiar with California's two-year-old End of Life Option Act, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients, and believes its service will be legal. The product is "100 percent fatal," says McIntyre. "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies."